Welcome Home! We Share In Your Freedom

He's free. The last one is free. His name is Terry Anderson and he is coming home. Yet we celebrate in a mist, as if someone had dimmed the lights. We cheer but our throats are dry.

Alann Steen is out and Joseph Cicippio and all the other American hostages are free, aren't they? Why do the drinks seem so weak? Why has the ice melted?

How do we celebrate the release of the victims? How does our national block party toast the price they have paid, as if their stunning courage has earned each of them a Survivor of the Century award? Do we pin the tail on their cruel and sadistic captors, young tormentors whose inhumanity might have been dealt with by a Nuremberg hangman had this been 1946?

The torment and execution of hostages is not a Mideastern art of the late 20th century. It has been a mid-century Nazi art, icy isolation of the living innocent by men of flawed conscience and flayed mind.

The Nazi hostages were most often seized in groups, slaughtered and dumped into shared pits they were compelled to dig. The hostages of groups calling themselves by such hysterical names as Organization of Islamic Holy War for the Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Justice Organization were kidnapped one by one.

To their captors they were hostages. Only by their distant families and friends were they still called by names of endearment in the lonely night and stifling day. Only in memory, only in absentia, were they addressed with respect.

They were chained when chains were not required. They were kept in the dark when light was all around them. They were deprived of affection, given no news, physically and mentally abused. The exercise of the libido, no small thing, was canceled for them.

They lived on their personal character as others might live on their amusements or their work. They had character in the bank and could make daily withdrawals without diminishing the principal.

The kidnappers could bind their lives, loves, work, hobbies, sports and bodies in painful hostage, but their character remained their own. Teeth rotted and skin was torn by metal restraints, but character grew stronger. It was one thing they possessed in greater depth than did their captors.

It makes sense to ignore hostages. Everyone knows that. Once you yield to the kidnapper, once you reach out with the ransom, you encourage others to enter that loathsome profession. Love doesn't always make sense, as you know if you are old enough to recognize these squiggles as words.

The weakness of the hostages is that they are loved. The strength of the hostages is that they are loved. In that fragile condition, loving and being loved, men may have price tags stuck into them, but they are without price to their families, countries, associates.

We do cheer Terry Anderson, Alann Steen, Joseph Cicippio, Tom Sutherland, Terry Waite, all the sturdy hostages who survived. We dance to their tune, fire rockets and pinwheels in an explosion of joy. We simply have to celebrate. Enthusiasm and happiness and eye-watering thanksgiving are the pulsating marks of our relief.

We know that not all Muslims share the fanatic indifference to humanity expressed by terrorists and kidnappers. Muslims of the world who condemn the hostage-takers and denounce terrorism will do much to reassure fellow residents of the planet. Muslims, Christians and Jews have discovered, late but not too late, that they have a lot to share and much to love in each other.

The aches? They will stay for a while. The marks of chains do not erase as readily as graffiti sprayed on an embassy wall.

We drop bitter pills along with sugar into each other's hot chocolate. We disappoint each other, wives and husbands, children and parents. How much freedom do we have? How often are we led by compulsions we cannot understand? How many failures do we claim?

The ordeal for the hostages cannot be contained by them or their families, because it forces its pain and anger into all of us, like dark water bursting through a dam and bobbing us, to our astonishment, into a valley we never heard of. We share.